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Zendi Nua
~8,000 years from the present Before colonization Zendi Nua was an island uninhabited by any prolific races. Only Kobolds, who lived deep underground, and Merfolk, who lived deep beyond its shores, called the island their home, and rarely treaded upon its surface. The island had been charted by dwarven seafarers, who named it Farstone, but no attempts to settle it were recorded. The Kobolds, who lived in small clans, had not produced any major construction or production projects. They mostly subsisted from hunting underground creatures and mushroom harvesting.' ' Arrival of the Zendeen The first peoples to produce large-scale settlements in the island were the Zendeen civilization. The Zendeen came from Sur-Zendar (“home of the Zendeen”), a powerful city-state in a far away continent. Today, it is presumed that the Zendeen evacuated their homelands due to a great cataclysm that leveled their city combined with attacks from their regional rivals. While this is true, it is only part of the story. The Zendeen had made Sur-Zendar an influential metropolis thanks to their military might. They were skilled warriors who used armor and weaponry made of indestructible steel that no other civilization could imitate. They were able to produce this steel (called, appropriately, zendium) by a secret mean that remains a mystery to this day. That secret was the Bonded Crucible, a metallic artifact that could turn any steel that was melted within it into a harder and more durable metal that was even lighter. Not even the Zendeen rulers themselves knew how they came into possession of this artifact (though some spoke of a brave adventurer who retrieved it from a dragon’s lair and presented it to a Zendeen prince, in order for him to accept his hand in marriage). ' '''The Bonded Crucible was, in actuality, the heart of an ascended metal dragon deity called Ixarmagun. When Ixarmagun’s body transcended the material plane, her essence became contained in her heart, and it remained a powerful vessel of her divine powers. The Zendeen used the Bonded Crucible to create their weaponry, and started to worship the artifact. Their clerics began to receive access to divine powers, though no one was quite certain of what exactly was the nature of the deity behind this. They simply believed the Crucible had been gifted to them by the God of Forges. However, hundreds of years after they had exploited the Bonded Crucible to subjugate their regional enemies through superior armaments, the artifact began a process of decay. After being separated from Ixarmagun herself for so long, the heart required sustenance to maintain its powers. And so it began feeding from the magical leylines that connect the land, sapping their strength. This in turn produced a series of natural disasters - hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, sulphuric rains -, centralized in Sur-Zendar. Then, it began affecting the nature of magic itself, making all sorts of magical adepts lose their connections to magic momentarily. This weakened the power of the Zendeen government so greatly that when the enemies they had put under the yoke and now sought revenge went to attack their capital, they were unable to put up a fight. Most of the Zendeen avoided witnessing the destruction of Sur-Zendar by taking to the seas, with the Bonded Crucible and most of their armaments in tow. And so they came upon the islands that are now named Zendi Nua and Zendi Lo (“small Zendi”). They colonized them, establishing several fishing villages around their coasts. They created a large temple in the heart of the island to keep the Bonded Crucible, which they locked down inside a dungeon. The temple’s construction was a truly massive endeavor in which all Zendeen men had to partake while the women tended the crops and fished. The Zendeen also began to exploit the mining potential of the island, and sold the ore to ships that stopped there to restock or protect themselves from storms. Soon enough, travellers started calling the islands “the Zendi” after their new inhabitants, and so they gained the names they are known for today. '''Zendeen golden age and collapse' The Zendeen waited for ten years before reopening the dungeon where the Bonded Crucible was locked. The clerics had felt their divine powers returning as each year passed, and they felt this was the moment to reuse its powers. They began forging new weapons and armor again, and sold them at a prime to exclusive buyers in exchange for materials and technology for advanced shipbuilding, as they sought to retake their homelands. Zendium became known all through the lands as the most extraordinary material of them all. Not much time passed before a great plague started to take hold of the islands. The Zendeen and any passing travellers contracted an exotic illness that caused their skin to turn to scales and their innards to slowly boil until their charred insides faltered. The Zendeen were dying in swaths, and soon after, from the 15.000 that had populated the island, less than a hundred remained, all of them infected by this plague and waiting to die. However, that was not to be their fate. The survivors of the plague found themselves starving for flesh, and some of them even turned to cannibalism. Others arranged ambushes on ships that came through with the intention to land momentarily and ate the seafaring crews. They all noticed how their senses and strength increased by the day, and how they felt a strange power growing inside them. The truth about the plague was that the Bonded Crucible had stopped sapping the magical leylines to now irradiate surplus energy that turned people into draconic abominations before dying, cooked from the inside. The survivors, however, happened to have some resistance that allowed them to master this ailment. All Zendeen survivors afterwards became Draconic Bloodline Bloodragers or Sorcerers. One survivor, a woman named Ayli who used to be a hierophant in the temple where the Bonded Crucible was kept,